The depth of the 2006–9 drought in the humid, southeastern US left several metropolitan areas with only a 60–120 day water supply. To put the region’s recent drought variability in a long-term perspective, a dense and diverse tree-ring network—including the first records throughout the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint river basin—is used to reconstruct drought from 1665 to 2010 CE. The network accounts for up to 58.1% of the annual variance in warm-season drought during the 20th century and captures wet eras during the middle to late 20th century. The reconstruction shows that the recent droughts are not unprecedented over the last 346 years. Indeed, droughts of extended duration occurred more frequently between 1696 and 1820. Our results indicate that the era in which local and state water supply decisions were developed and the period of instrumental data upon which it is based are amongst the wettest since at least 1665. Given continued growth and subsequent industrial, agricultural and metropolitan demand throughout the southeast, insights from paleohydroclimate records suggest that the threat of water-related conflict in the region has potential to grow more intense in the decades to come.

The conclusion contains the text

The latter 20th century instrumental data, upon which regional water supply management decisions are based, is characterized by frequent wet events that are not representative of much of the prior 300 yr. Investigations of long-term drought in other regions of the southeastern US have similar findings: the 20th century appears wetter in the context of the last 400–1000 years…..The climatic patterns revealed here—the pervasively drier 18th century, the weak wet periods of the 19th century, and the high frequency of extreme drought in the early 18th and 19th centuries—provide valuable baseline scenarios for simulation of inter-annual climate variability and water resources planning that do not appear in the more recent, relatively wetter instrumental records. Although non-stationarity of the climate system could cause climate variability to differ from what has occurred historically …..this reconstruction provides a broader representation of the potential range of climate variability than is available from the instrumental record alone, and thus is a valuable tool for understanding the context of extreme events to which our infrastructure must be able to adapt.

This paper is an excellent application of the need to include recent paleo-data analyses into the risk society and the environment face in the coming decades, as we have urged in our article